Quoting Quiverfull: If She Only Knew?

Revealing how her son kept bumping into things in the store on a summer day, she asked him what was wrong and soon realised why he was keeping his head down, having taught him from a young age to avert his eyes from temptation.

“I’m just looking down, Mom,” And with a nod, he indicated the ads placed strategically above us. Billboards for the lingerie department. Yikes. I’d not seen them,” she writes in the blog.

“But then again … I’m not a vulnerable young man either.”

She goes on to write how bad she feels that we live in a world “so ready to compromise a man’s commitment to clean living” and admits while it’s never been easy it’s far worse now.

According to Jacobson, not even Christian camps are safe from temptation.

“Most of the ladies there were dressed for a hot summer day. Many with bare skin exposed,” Mrs Jacobson writes of her experience sending her son to camp.

“I noticed a pretty girl nearby and wondered if she realised how difficult she was making it for a guy. Surely, she would have made another choice if she had.

“If she only understood how hard he’s trying to do the right thing.

“If she only knew that the way she dressed up meant a good man needed to look down.

“He had to turn away from her beauty. That he was missing out on her loveliness because she was showing him more than he was meant to see.”

Comments open below

QUOTING QUIVERFULL is a regular feature of NLQ – we present the actual words of noted Quiverfull leaders and ask our readers: What do you think? Agree? Disagree? This is the place to state your opinion. Please, let’s keep it respectful – but at the same time, we encourage readers to examine the ideas of Quiverfull honestly and thoughtfully.

If she only understood that her need to dress in a way that was comfortable for the hot weather is far, far less important than her son’s need to observe attractive girls without being TOO attracted. Or something.

I’m actually not trying to make the son the bad guy in this. He’s having some pretty sick head games played on him as well, in ways that pretty much require him to see women(/women’s bodies) as sex objects (in this case, to be avoided) or fear god’s wrath.

But dictating how women dress doesn’t fix this, and pushing the idea that that’s the problem makes it worse. There are cultures (generally in hot climates) where women wear little more than a loincloth and are still seen as interacted with as people; mothers, wives, daughters. There is nothing intrinsically sexual about the way they are dressed. That is their normal. But once you start pushing the agenda that how much of a woman’s body you can see determines how ‘sexual’ she is, there are few limits. In our own culture, even in the few places where it isn’t illegal, topless women are treated like fair targets for all the sexual harassment(and even assaults) that they are ‘asking for,’ while it’s something almost everyone accepts that men are free to do, whether they have breasts or not. In the Victorian era when most women were expected to be buttoned up from neck to toe, hair tightly updo-ed, body tightly corseted, the sight of a woman’s ankle or unbound hair was treated as provocative. In many Middle Eastern cultures, women cover their hair and wear long-sleeved, leg covering loose fitting clothing, similar (but less restrictive) to Victorian levels of coverage. In a small handful of Middle Eastern cultures, women are REQUIRED to wear tent-like garments that hide everything but their faces, or tent-like garments that hide everything but their eyes, or tent-like garments with a face mesh where no part of the woman is visible at all.

‘Modesty’ is a moving target, and an unreachable one as a culture, as long as it is defined by what the heterosexual male libido responds to. As each level of coverage becomes the norm, anything less is seen as downright provocative, and plenty of men still find plenty to be turned on by within the ‘normal’ way of dressing, the body areas focused on just goes from cleavage and thighs, to calves and arms, to hair and neck and having two separate legs, to wrists and ankles and hands and that face is still visible, to eyes, to voice and movement. As long as heterosexual men are attracted to women, they will find things to be aroused by, and ‘modesty’ ceases being ‘modest’ as it becomes the norm. Women can stay ahead of the curve and cover more than they are expected to, and maybe briefly be the recipients of less sexual desire, but they’ll also be miserable in hot weather (among other things), or unhappily find out that men can be just as turned on by their imaginations concerning ‘what she looks like under there’ as they can be by seeing for themselves.

In other words, maybe if this lady’s son were regularly exposed to more, er, exposed women than he’s probably used to, he wouldn’t ‘struggle’ so hard when around all of the women out there who dress more for the weather than for tiptoing around his dick. You’re fighting a losing battle, there, mom; even if you got your way and everyone in the world dressed to your definition of ‘modesty,’ your son would probably find SOMETHING arousing about those long demin skirts.

Trollface McGee

If only she (mum) knew that by teaching her son that a woman’s only value is her appearance and the virgin sex she owes him on his wedding day then maybe the son wouldn’t be bumping into things.
If only she understood that the young lady was a human being, dressed appropriately for hot weather who may or may not have any thoughts about her son because she’s a human being and has her own mind…then she’d be out of a “tut tut slutty ladies” blog post but her kid would be better off for it.

brbr2424

This explains where men with messed up perceptions of women come from. She is teaching her son to see women as less than human. Hopefully, he doesn’t turn into the next BTK killer.

Saraquill

It’s been explained to me heaps of times, but it still surprises me how scared these people are of sexy thoughts.

JetGirl

Well, duh. The answer here is clear. Stop taking your son to the store! Keep him at home, preferably in a courtyard with high walls where he can’t see outside. If you must take him out, then make him wear dark glasses, blinders and a visor.
You can’t be too careful!
Wait. That’s too unreasonable?

The_L1985

And when you’ve been raised with a similarly-distorted view of sex, all you can do is nod with understanding. The creepy sex-phobia of extreme fundies is different from the standard Christian view of sex in degree, but not in kind.

aim2misbehave

“I noticed a pretty girl nearby and wondered if she realised how
difficult she was making it for a guy. Surely, she would have made
another choice if she had.

“If she only understood how hard he’s trying to do the right thing.

“If she only knew that the way she dressed up meant a good man needed to look down.”

Nope, still not going to make the “other choice” to give myself heatstroke because of what a guy might think of me…

(What’s even more amazing is that this woman acknowledged that the women in the store actually had a very obvious, understandable reason to be dressing in minimal clothing, and yet still thinks that her son’s inability to control himself trumps that reason)